I'm so excited to hit publish on the latest episode of the Slow Hunch Podcast, where I chat with author, thinker and creator Steven Johnson.
As anyone who's read this blog over the years knows, the idea for the concept "The Slow Hunch" comes from Steven's book Where Good Ideas Come From. I've always loved that book and have drawn so much inspiration from it over the years.
One of the key ideas in WGICF is the "Commonplace Book", which was essentially a scrapbook of ideas, notes, and thoughts, typically kept by some of history's great thinkers. Steven chronicles how thinkers like Darwin used a commonplace book not just to capture their own thoughts, but to paste notes from readings and others' ideas. And, most importantly, the key to making a commonplace book work was committing to re-reading the notes over time, on the chance that connections likely exist that you might not have realized previously. Thus, laying the groundwork for turning Slow Hunches into big breakthroughs.
Shortly after reading the book (nearly 15 years ago now), I wrote this post seeking a digital version of the Commonplace Book. A way of replicating this experience but using digital tools and stitching together notes, ideas and thoughts from across our digital lived experience.
It took a while, but now with the advent of LLMs, it's more possible than ever to build such tools. And in fact, and of course, Steven has actually been working on one -- for the past several years he's been working with the team at Google Labs to build NotebookLM, and AI-powered commonplace book.
In my conversation with Steven, we talk about his personal Slow Hunch on the path to "tools for networked thought" -- spanning his first explorations with Hypercard in the 1980s all the way to his work on NotebookLM today.
As always, the episode can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and anywhere else you might catch a pod. Enjoy!
